The Middle Future* by Public Fiction Nikita Gale, Anna Sew Hoy and Andrea Longacre-White. (or “made public”) when hung. This “book” is meant to be, in the model of Aspen and many others of its kind, a publication-as-an-exhibition, and a civic-minded mode of distribution.
On view at the American Academy in Rome until April 2016.
*The Middle Future: between idealism and disillusionment, opti- and pessi- isms. It is a time in the near present at that perfectly soft-focus distance, that never really needs to sharpen in order to be effective. Its effectiveness lies in the ability to keep us going, like getting clean, believing a promise of change, or changing… signs out of existing signifiers, rearranged. Each one in its own way exposing a slip in meaning, the failure of language to define a future in which opposites are obsolete, in which we live in a radical center between fixed definitions, and need symbols that do not represent one pole or another, but rather a higher middle.
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